Pei-Ying Lin

Pei-Ying Lin was the Sheng Yen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism, 2015-2017. Her research interests are Chan Buddhism, ordination rituals, Bodhisattva precepts, and Buddhist discourse on cultural identity. She studied at National Taiwan University (BA in Political Science, 2002), Cambridge University (MPhil in Oriental Studies, 2006), and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (PhD in the Study of Religion, 2012). Her thesis brought together a wide range of documents from ninth-century China, Japan and Korea, and cross-culturally examined the relationship between patriarchal lineages versus textual transmission at the early stage of the history of Chan Buddhism. Before coming to Berkeley, she was a Research Fellow at Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv University. At UC Berkeley, she worked on a project involving a group of eighth-century precept manuals, analyzing the doctrinal and historical connections between Chan Buddhism and Esoteric Buddhism during the Tang dynasty, with a focus on the commonality of their key components of precepts and meditation. She is now based at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan.